Seymour's new cryo-silver pickup

[Rick Turner]

The Teflon coated magnet wire that I have is not silver plated; it's Teflon on copper. This is not like wire wrap wire; it's normal appearing magnet wire with very thin Teflon on it. I'll try measuring its diameter with the coating in place.

I wouldn't dare try a thermal stripper on it, it would snap. I very carefully sand it with 220 sandpaper to solder it. Nice slippery pain in the ass to work with stuff.

[Joe Gwinn]

The Teflon coated magnet wire that I have is not silver plated; it's Teflon on copper. This is not like wire wrap wire; it's normal appearing magnet wire with very thin Teflon on it. I'll try measuring its diameter with the coating in place.

Ahh. That works too.

I wouldn't dare try a thermal stripper on it, it would snap. I very carefully sand it with 220 sandpaper to solder it. Nice slippery pain in the ass to work with stuff.

If the thermal stripper head is properly designed, it should not damage the wire.

I would bet that a piece of nichrome wire kept at a red heat, with the teflon-insulated magnet wire laid onto the hot nichrome by hand and rotated a bit, would work.

Or a heated piece of nichrome ribbon with a little V notch cut into it to accept the magnet wire.

[Rick Turner]

Joe, this is 44 gauge wire here, and the Teflon is bonded to the wire just as surely as normal Formvar or whatever is bonded to the wire with "normal" magnet wire.

I use a set of "HotWeezers"...the best thermal wire strippers I could find...for all my regular harness wiring tasks. They won't work with this 44 ga. Teflon wire.

It's OK, I've learned to carefully sand away enough Teflon to solder to my terminals, and I'm not planning on making these pickups as a regular product at this time.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Just a completely random thought... polyurethane wire is typically combined with a small amount of nylon, but is available with or without from some wire makers, though the poly-nylon dominates. Might some make a poly-teflon in lieu of a poly-nylon? I only ask because Joe seemed to think that teflon would have issues bonding to raw copper, and I have to admit that all the teflon wire I've seen has had a silver color to it, but I honestly didn't think much of it at the time. Maybe a batch was made for someone who needed a super slippery wire for whatever application, but the specific dielectric properties of teflon weren't as important.

[Joe Gwinn]

Joe, this is 44 gauge wire here, and the Teflon is bonded to the wire just as surely as normal Formvar or whatever is bonded to the wire with "normal" magnet wire.

I use a set of "HotWeezers"...the best thermal wire strippers I could find...for all my regular harness wiring tasks. They won't work with this 44 ga. Teflon wire.

Those HotWeezers look pretty useful for small diameter wire. Probably can't strip the magnet wire because the teflon is bonded to the copper, as you imply. I suppose one could burn the teflon along the full strip length.

It's OK, I've learned to carefully sand away enough Teflon to solder to my terminals, and I'm not planning on making these pickups as a regular product at this time.

I cannot believe that this is the best way. A major user of such wire will be the military, and they would never accept hand sanding, for reliability reasons.

I would ask the wire manufacturer.

Actually, the method may be the powered eraser. http://www.eraser.com/browsecat.cgi?mode=open&id=116

[Rick Turner]

Joe, if I were going to make Teflon insulated wire pickups on a regular basis, I'd find a better way of stripping the stuff. When I looked into it, the recommendation was chemical stripping, but any chemical that can can dissolve Teflon is a chemical I don't want to deal with!

[Joe Gwinn]

Joe, if I were going to make Teflon insulated wire pickups on a regular basis, I'd find a better way of stripping the stuff. When I looked into it, the recommendation was chemical stripping, but any chemical that can can dissolve Teflon is a chemical I don't want to deal with!

Understood. But I have to ask - what chemical was that?

[salvarsan]

When I looked into it, the recommendation was chemical stripping, but any chemical that can can dissolve Teflon is a chemical I don't want to deal with!

I've heard of molten salt baths for stripping wire. It would probably be enough to soften teflon insulation for mechanical removal.

I'm concerned that anything strong enough to dissolve teflon would dissolve its container as well as teflon and wire.

[David Schwab]

De-icide?

Like, "God is dead and we killed him"?

Hey, I didn't do it!

It's not the carrots that make the stew, but everything else included.

When I was tweaking stomp boxes, a collection of incremental changes gave the best results.

Right, but you do the changes one at a time, or you are left wondering what did what? Especially if you don't like it. As an example, I tried a pickup with stainless steel blades and felt it was too harsh and midrangy. I could have wound it differently, or changed the blade material, or did both. I changed the blades and that fixed it. If I had also wound it differently it might have been good, or I might have been chasing my tail for a while. That is if I had a tail.

But as I said, maybe the combination was the thing.

[Joe Gwinn]

I've heard of molten salt baths for stripping wire. It would probably be enough to soften teflon insulation for mechanical removal.

I think the Eraser Corp people offer such a thing. The molten salt is NaOH in some kind of antifreeze, so it won't boil below 200 C, if memory serves. Copper is not harmed.

I'm concerned that anything strong enough to dissolve teflon would dissolve its container as well as teflon and wire.

I wondered what one could use to hold such a super acid. Turns out to be teflon. See the safety section of the Wiki article. Wonder how long the copper will last.

[NightWinder]

I think I'll buy a spool and try some out. That way you know for sure.

[Joe Gwinn]

We discussed teflon insulated magnet wire a few years ago

Here is the link: http://music-electronics-forum.com/t16497/

[frankfalbo]

I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had heard them. Or that you must work here in product development to know all that stuff about how we operate. Hmmm, right under my nose and I never saw you. Well I have a pretty big nose.

I'm headed to the office I'll try to answer more points later.

[Steve Conner]

I think hot uranium hexafluoride does a pretty good job of Teflon.

An important point in connection with this thread: Rick thinks it's crazy to reject things based on theory: the "don't knock it until you've tried it" school of thought. But there isn't enough time in the world to acquire experience of everything and anything that you might want to reject. Edison never tried ham sandwiches for his lamp filaments, because he knew from theory that they wouldn't work.

With a scientific understanding of the principles of human hearing, you can equally reject a lot of things without bothering to try them. All of the audiophile cable crap is on the same level as making a lamp filament out of a ham sandwich. The ear is basically a filter bank such as you would find in a vocoder, and hence it can't hear anything that a FFT analyzer (which is just a sophisticated kind of filter bank) can't see.

(For the real weenies, I concede that the ear somehow breaks the frequency/time resolution tradeoff inherent in man-made frequency analyzers, by means so far unknown. This was probably an evolutionary adaptation to allow direction finding of transient sounds, such as twigs snapping under the feet of a sabre-toothed tiger, but I don't think it affects my argument greatly.)

I believe that so-called "golden ears" have exactly the same hearing apparatus as an ordinary person, barring hearing damage. It's just hooked up to a more highly trained and discerning brain. (Or the real cynic might say, a more highly developed sense of cork-sniffing bullshit.)

But the point is that it can't discern anything that a spectrogram couldn't display, because of the limitations of the hardware it has to work with. In the case of different woods in a guitar, I can believe that would be audible and measurable. Silver wire and exotic slugs in a pickup, maybe. I think the main "ingredient" there is that it was designed by Seymour Duncan, who knows how to make a great sounding pickup, and the materials hardly matter except for marketing purposes, which is a massive "except".

Wannabe golden ears can test my hypothesis by doing ABX blind tests with various bit rates of MP3, as it's designed on a psychoacoustic model. How high a bit rate can you reliably tell from the uncompressed original? I lose it somewhere between 192 and 256k, which I believe is fairly average.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

"Edison never tried ham sandwiches for his lamp filaments, because he knew from theory that they wouldn't work."

I think I'm going to steal this phrase often. I love it!

I will say that I'm frequently surprised when I hear a difference in something and it is completely contrary to what I thought made sense. Experiments give us data, and data give us theories. Some people prefer to make data from theories and skip the experiments. Xaar makes a good point in that many luthiers/music techs (I won't be the one to single out Seymour though) tend to come up with good data but have a disconnect in having the theory. They'll be absolutely right that doing something will yield a certain result and will master their trade - but the scientific reasoning they come up with sometimes is a tad bit strange. I hear lots of things every day where I take the exact reasoning with a grain of salt, but if I respect the person giving me the advice, I trust their ears, consider the issue, and maybe respectfully disagree.

Why are cryogenics such BS? I don't think I've talked to anyone who has wound pickups that wouldn't argue that a pickup changes sound after the first day or two of existence. Personally I might attribute this to something like an annealing process of the coil. Cryogenic freezing isn't the same as annealing but it is closely related. I don't know if it would make a desirable or noticeable effect, but it isn't voodoo to think that it would change the sound of a pickup.

I don't think anyone here has as masterful of a control and understanding over all the variables of pickup making as they think they do. We're all experimenters when you get down to it. If anyone here truly had a God-like control of all the variables they'd be making pickups so amazing that they'd put everyone else out of business.